A longtime friend of mine who I hadn’t heard from in years sent me a surprising email. The message was simple. “You’ve got to see this! Sick, yet enlightening! Cameron Diaz plays with poop!”

I hate too many exclamation marks, but my friend is normally an intelligent person. I assumed she’d found a video pertinent to me. With great anticipation and some fear, I opened the video imagining that goofy blonde movie star scooping her hands in piles of human excrement and lifting it to the god of Hollywood. “Make me the biggest star in the world,” she’d pray to the prince of the Undergloom.

But instead, I clicked the URL and saw the strained face of the president of the United States greeting the citizens of America. Poop? Diaz? What’s the deal? I thought. This is shit. If I wanted to watch that celebrity president give a fascist speech and explain away some atrocity or cover-up his administration had engaged in, I’d take precious time out of my day to do so.

My friend had sent the wrong link. She said it was an accident. I’m still not so sure. She’s an Obama-fan. He’s got nice abs, she says, for being over 50. He’s got a solid jump shot, too, I said, but that doesn’t mean I like that he’s been smoothly lying to our faces since 2008 and getting away with it. And killing our fellow humans overseas and denying it.

So I can say that I too watched with great intrigue the president come clean with the American public about the rampant NSA surveillance systems that have been exposed for just over six months, thanks to the millions of leaked documents by former defense contract worker, Edward Snowden. And I, like many others who saw the speech, found myself, as I expected, muttering, Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

Why, oh Lord, would we ever believe any of the sounds that are ceremoniously pushed past this president’s vocal cords?

There were a lot of reactions, and the major media outlets have been dissecting the president’s statements over and over again. But the two I think are most interesting come from my grandmother and Julian Assange, the head of WikiLeaks who is still holed-up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

Assange was not kind to President Obama. He too was offended by the nearly hour-long speech filled with hollow assurances and vague phrases offering solutions to the nightmare surveillance state we’ve woken up trapped inside. Assange’s commentary made the president’s speech seem shallow in comparison.

“We heard a lot of lies in this speech,” the WikiLeaks founder said, and called President Obama’s blathering “embarrassing.” The calls for reform were meaningless, and there is no talk of prosecuting officials like James Clapper, who openly lied to congress about unlawfully spying on US citizens.

Radio show host Alex Jones said Obama was running scared and is trying hard to avoid being arrested for his role in what is essentially criminal activity by factions of the United States government. As the approval ratings plummet for Obama, congresspeople, and the mass surveillance itself, the president’s speech was yet another attempt to satiate the masses with inane arguments for ubiquitous, unwarranted spying on Americans.

My grandmother also caught the president’s speech. She is 88 years old and says it sounds like a lot of baloney to her. She dismissed my fears of a mass surveillance state having been formed around us with a puff of air. Poof. “I never owned a computer in my life,” she said, “and never been on the Internet. The only people I call are Delores and Irene to see if they want to play Scrabble.”